1. Learning to Drink: the Social History of an Idea

1 Learning to drink: The social history of an idea The idea that you could teach people to drink sensibly has been around for decades. In the United States, this notion was of particular interest after the end of Prohibition in 1933,1 prompted by the challenge of encouraging moderation after years of binge drinking, criminal gangs selling illicit grog, adulterated drinks and speakeasies.2 One who rose to the challenge was American etiquette aficionado Alma Whitaker (1933: 2), who endeavoured to communicate to post-Prohibition drinkers what older, more experienced countries knew about the ‘precious creed’ of moderation. In her aptly titled book Bacchus behave! The lost art of polite drinking, she stressed the need to appreciate the sacred rituals of etiquette to experience the benefits of wines and spirits as social lubricants. In this way, we could learn to drink and, ‘properly fortified with instructive information, we may yet learn to carry our liquor like gentlemen. It’s deucedly messy when we don’t’ (2). Whitaker declared that the ‘right quantity imbibed under the right conditions affords a pleasant stimulation’, while people who became drunk revealed all their nastier 1 Prohibition (1920–33) was a political failure, but was positive in other ways. There is good evidence that there was less drinking and abuse than before World War I; the cirrhosis mortality rate dropped sharply then plateaued, as did the alcoholism mortality rate. There was a differential affect across social classes and across regions: while the law was flouted in the north and east (and in New Orleans), the working-class people of the south and west were largely dry (Cook 2007: 26). 2 Speakeasy: an illicit drinking venue of the Prohibition years. 1 TEACHING 'PROPER' DRINKING? inhibitions (4–5).3 She believed that women had a civilising influence on men and that they would be an important influence in post-Prohibition America. Above all, Whitaker argued that it was deplorable to drink enough to become beyond one’s self. To avoid any such loss of composure, her first simple rule of behaviour was never to get drunk. Intoxication has remained morally reprehensible, or at least questionable, in most public discourse throughout the modern period (Room 2005: 149). However, rather than banishing alcohol altogether, societies have held out hope that neophyte drinkers, as well as established drinkers with bad habits, could learn or re-learn ‘civilised’ moderate drinking. In the 1970s, behavioural research suggested that this would indeed be possible. Many of these ideas permeated Australian governments’ thinking about the potential solutions to problem drinking among Indigenous people. Taming undisciplined consumption In the tradition of books of manners through the ages, Whitaker (1933) not only advised on personal comportment, but also provided advice on being a good guest, serving the right sort of food and drink for particular occasions and which customs should be frowned upon. By the time she was writing, the cultures of the West had come to despise a lack of self-control and to attribute success and respectability—indeed morality itself—to the power of a disciplined will (Room 1985: 135). However, the qualities of self-constraint and control over one’s conduct were not innate: they had to be conditioned in people and produced through the internalisation of socially constructed rules of politeness and good manners. Norbert Elias (1982) described how this conditioning—the ‘civilising process’, as he called it—required the pacification of the individual and the absorption into social norms of notions of bodily propriety, cleanliness and order, so that people came to believe that these represented the features of a good and proper life (Frykman & Löfgren 1987). These notions had their origins in post-medieval European courtly society, during a transformative period that served as a bridge between the Middle Ages and modernity, as observed by Elias (1982) in his analysis of books on manners and the concept of civilité.4 During this period, manners among the elite were softened to 3 I am grateful to Robin Room for alerting me to Alma Whitaker’s book and to the work of Morris Chafetz and others. 4 Civilité: civility, politeness, courtesy. 2 1. LEARNING TO DRINK distinguish them from the coarse manners of peasants. At the same time, outward manifestations of bodily propriety came to be seen as expressions of the inner, whole person. These ‘civilised’ ways of comporting oneself were elaborated further among the elite in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Eventually, these behaviours became transformed into the dominant, mainstream culture of modern European society. In fact, they became the norms of Western middle-class culture: second nature. Elias (1978) saw civilisation both as a process and a concept. As a concept, it was a self-conscious construct by the ‘West’ in which European society came to believe itself to be superior to earlier societies, as well as to contemporary but more ‘primitive’ ones (3–4). In their analysis of the making of the middle-class world view of nineteenth-century Swedes, Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren (1987) went further, suggesting that barbarism was eliminated by using health as ammunition in the civilising process: a civilised person had to be convinced that if he or she transgressed or failed to internalise social norms, then he or she would actually come to physical harm (255). In this way, ‘civilised’ people who worried about their physical as well as their spiritual health had to watch themselves; they had to be clean, wholesome, of good conduct and exert self-discipline. By contrast, ‘uncivilised’, unconstrained, rowdy comportment (such as uproarious drinking among peasants) demonstrated a heedlessness of the consequences. In pre-industrial England, daily drinking was the means by which social relations were both generated and reinforced. Among the labouring classes, there was a mutual obligation to treat others with drinks, as it was through this giving and exchanging of drinks that people established and remade the social ties of obligation and reciprocity. For English villagers, these symbolic values were more important than the possibility of a drunken accident or a bad hangover; not to drink was virtually unheard of, as it would represent a complete withdrawal from socially meaningful existence (Adler 1991: 381, Schivelbusch 1993).5 These descriptions of the symbolic meanings attached to alcohol in English village society prior to 1830 bear remarkable similarity to the meaning of drinking among many Aboriginal people in Australia today. For Aboriginal people, as for eighteenth-century English villagers, the integrity of social relations rest on claims to rights and the fulfilment of mutual obligations that are 5 The same was true of colonial Sydney, according to an account by F Fowler in 1859, in which ‘not to drink is considered a crime. Aut bibat, aut abeat—which means, in Australia, if you will not “stand” you may walk’ (Birch & Macmillan 1962: 156–7). 3 TEACHING 'PROPER' DRINKING? often prior to other considerations. With the advent of modern industrial society in Europe, there was additional reason to subdue the excesses of the labouring classes, often expressed through unrestrained drinking at carnivals and festivals as well as shared daily drinking. Rural labouring work, such as haymaking and sheep shearing, had been punctuated by four or five meal breaks a day accompanied by pints of strong beer, but this could not occur in a factory, for the timing, location and style of this kind of drinking threatened the orderly development of industrial production. A new industrial workforce had to learn the disciplines of punctuality, routine and perseverance (Adler 1991). It became necessary to quarantine drinking, confining it to acceptable physical and temporal limits, and to create a separate sphere for leisure time. By the late eighteenth century, the eight-hour day was widely adopted in industries in Britain and Australia (Melbourne, in particular, was a focus of eight-hour day activism) and this helped indirectly to create the notion of recreational time and, with it, a burgeoning of alternatives and counterattractions to drinking for members of the public: sport, outdoor activities, dancing and museums. Modern societies expect that adults will respect the divide between work and leisure: adults are expected to be soberly attentive and conscientious when in charge of small children, when driving, using machinery and at work (Room 2011). Of great assistance in this project was the temperance movement that arose in England and America (and Australia) in the nineteenth century. By preaching discipline, sobriety and self-control, the temperance movement’s urgings dovetailed well with the needs of an emergent industrial economy. Indeed, by discouraging workers from spending their wages at the tavern, and by encouraging a middle-class home life and promoting thrift, temperance became a vehicle for the transmission of a middle-class domestic ideology (Adler 1991, Kociumbas 1995, Burnett 1999). Ideas of temperance and moderation helped to create a domestic market for consumer goods; there would, after all, be more cash and leisure time available to devote to buying things. The temperance movement itself was class conscious: wine, for example, (considered a civilised drink consumed by the educated classes) was not often singled out for condemnation, whereas ‘spirituous liquors’ (preferred by the lower orders) were. Reflecting this inclination, the temperance movement initially called for moderation, thus allowing for the consumption of wine rather than complete abstinence. It was only later in the nineteenth century that temperance advocates rejected social drinking altogether and promoted abstinence from all alcoholic beverages. 4 1. LEARNING TO DRINK For employers, controlling their workers’ alcohol consumption and giving support to temperance activities were ways in which they could improve productivity and ensure a healthy industrial labour force. This explains why, in late nineteenth-century England, several villages and ‘garden cities’ were built by industrialists for their workers.

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